Consumer Guide Album

The Whitefield Brothers: Earthology [Now-Again, 2010]
Guitarist Jan and drummer Max Weissenfeldt got the hang of deep funk in boogie-down Munich under their Poets of Rhythm alias. But on this reassuring piece of big-bottomed exotica, the "Sahara swing" they concocted with Karl Hector is the tipoff. They love the continuity bass-and-drums lay below; I love the content koto and flute and malletophone add on. The reassuring part being that somehow, without marshaling Middle Eastern instruments, the gestalt evokes a cradle of civilization we need to motorvate. A-